She has a strong sense of justice and hard work, and is always a champion for her friends. She apprentices to an older blacksmith, Frostpine, who teaches her skilled and magical metalwork, and eventually becomes a master of her craft.

In later books, as she grows older, she also falls in love with a woman, and this is treated as perfectly normal. Having grown up with Daja, her friends and their adventures, this was absolutely wonderful and unprecedented for childrens’ series at the time.

In 2001 or 2002, I forget which, my friend and fellow writer Bruce Coville approached me about recording my Circle of Magic quartet with his new audio book company, Full Cast Audio. Because of my background in doing radio during the 1980s, I was thrilled to have the chance to get in front of a microphone again and to hear my characters given life by a group of good actors. There is no feeling quite like it. With movies and television, the studio’s choice of actors and visual details never quite matches the way anyone, particularly the author, imagined the story. With audio productions, though, the right actor can give the listener’s imagination an extra hook on which to hang her/his imagination, the extra boost that makes the book live in the listener’s mind.

About Me

I was born in South Connellsville, Fayette County, Pennsylvania, on December 13, 1954, which makes me a Sagittarius, if you believe in such things. For those who look to Eastern tradition, I was born in the Year of the Horse. My mother wanted to name me “Tamara,” but the nurse who filled out my birth certificate had never heard of such a fancy name (we are talking Pennsylvania coal country in the 1950s), so she misspelled it, and I legitimately became Tamora (pronounced like “camera”). I actually like it better than Tamara, which means “graceful” and “a palm tree,” and is the name of a Russian saint. I am none of these things.

The Latest

Arram. Varice. Ozorne. In the first book in the Numair Chronicles, three student mages are bound by fate . . . fated for trouble. Arram Draper is on the path to becoming one of the realm’s most powerful mages. The youngest student in his class at the Imperial University of Carthak, he has a Gift […]